My previous two articles were on two unique festivals of Kerala: Onam and Thiruvathira. There is another festival that is unique to Kerala in the manner of its celebrations — Vishu. It masquerades as a New Year’s Day festival, keeping up with Ugadi, Bighu, Ram Navami, Nav Varas, Vaisakhi, Putandu and other similar festivities celebrated around March-April in the rest of India with the beginning of a new calendar year according to Hindu lunisolar calendars. Yet, Kerala’s traditional calendar is not lunisolar at all — it is a solar calendar, like the Gregorian calendar followed worldwide today. Strangely, Vishu falls on the ninth month of this Malayalam solar calendar; not on the first month, as one would expect from a New Year’s Day.
Vishu in fact marks the first day of a new agricultural season. It was predominantly an agricultural festival in the past. Newly harvested vegetables and fruits, fresh flowers and other symbols of prosperity were typically offered to the presiding deity of the household in a temporary shrine on the morning of Vishu. It is interesting that its timing and significance closely follows the festival of the pharaonic Egyptian fertility god Min that was also celebrated long ago (ca. 2000 BCE or earlier) in the ninth Egyptian month opening a new agricultural season. Indeed, the deity’s name Min evokes the Malayalam word for soil, mann — the basis for everything agricultural.
Kerala’s solar calendar is unique to the state in all of India. This Malayalam calendar was reset in 825 CE and the months were given Sanskritized names around the same time that the region underwent a Brahmanical revolution. No one knows what the previous calendar looked like prior to this re-dating. There are various stories to justify the new calendar, yet none of them is entirely complete. According to at least one account, King Udaya Marthanda Varma of Kollam convened a council of all the learned men of Kerala with the object of introducing a new calendar for reasons unknown, and after making some astronomical research, it was resolved to adopt the new calendar from August 15, 825, setting the date as New Year Day Chingam 1.
Bizarrely, although this was a chance to synchronize the Malayalam calendar with the rest of India which followed a lunisolar calendar, such was not done. In all fairness, the Hindu lunisolar calendar is not the same in all of India; slight variations exist across different regions, but for the most part, they all follow a sidereal year for the solar cycle with adjustments of lunar cycles every three years. According to sidereal year calculations, the time taken by the sun to return to the same location relative to the fixed stars is counted as one year. In the Hindu calendar, the new year begins when the sun enters the Aries constellation.
In contrast, Kerala’s solar calendar starts with the sun moving into constellation Leo in the month of Chingam. The months have no fixed number of days — just like the Gregorian solar calendar — varying from twenty-nine to thirty-one days according to the sun’s position relative to the stars. Additionally, while the solar year forms the civil calendar, the lunar year regulates religious festivals. And to make matters even more confusing, there are two Malayalam calendars: one followed in South Kerala, which commences in Chingam around August 15, and another followed in North Kerala, which commences in Kanni, a full month later around September 15.
One can only assume that the reason for this failure to match the new Malayalam calendars with the existing lunisolar Hindu calendar was a desire to minimize any disruption in daily life from the change. As Padmanabhan Menon posed in 1937, “What need could there have been for all the [astronomical recalculations] unless the astronomers of the period anxious to start a new Era, were adapting and amending for their purpose one that was actually current at the time?” If indeed that was the case, it follows that the old Malayalam calendar must also have been a solar calendar.
The Malayalam calendar is said to have been reset exactly 3926 years after its establishment, which local Brahmanical lore attributes to the start of the Kali Yuga. Thus, having been reset in 825 CE, the calendar followed in Kerala was originally set around 3101 BCE. Coincidentally, pharaonic Egypt’s civil calendar was instituted around 3100 BCE, a timeframe startlingly close to the inception of the Malayalam calendar within margins of error. Indeed, pharaonic Egypt had a solar civil calendar and a lunar religious calendar, a scheme extraordinarily like the one in Kerala. The Egyptian solar calendar also had a yearly start date (concurring with the flooding of the Nile) around mid-August, another remarkable parallel with the Malayalam calendar.
Given the lack of any congruence between the Malayalam solar calendar and the Hindu lunisolar calendar, and the propensity of Brahmanism to paint everything in Puranic lore, resetting Kerala’s calendar according to Kali Yuga smells like a Brahmanical red herring. It is more plausible, based on trans-oceanic connections and the remarkable parallels between the Egyptian and Malayalam calendars, that ancient Kerala may have been following the same calendar as pharaonic Egypt, similar to the modern-day world-wide practice of following the Gregorian calendar for ease of international business transactions. Indeed, the mummy of pharaoh Ramesses II, ca. 1210 BCE, was found embalmed with black pepper, which is indigenous to Kerala, suggesting quite strongly that its trade contact with Egypt and corresponding calendar-sharing may date as far back.
But the Egyptian civil calendar had a fatal flaw: it lacked a leap year. Thus, it fell away from the natural seasons entirely within two hundred or so years. Yet, because the calendar was considered holy, even the pharaohs were forbidden from changing it. So, it remained uncorrected until Egypt fell to the Romans, who then revised the calendar around 23 BCE to include leap years. By 23 BCE, Kerala had trade relations with myriad other nations — East Africa, Southeast Asia, Arabia, China, other parts of India — and since the Romans neither had the inclination nor any influence to revise Kerala’s calendar, it is not unreasonable to presume that Kerala’s faulty calendar remained unchanged, unlike Egypt’s.
If indeed Kerala had been following the unadjusted original Egyptian solar calendar, the error accumulated over centuries would have been considerable by 825 CE. An approximate calculation gives an error of 251 days; in other words, the natural calendar of seasons had wandered away from the civil calendar by so many days. Perhaps some of the more nostalgic minded astronomers of King Udaya Marthanda Varma simply chose the original start date of the old calendar, August 15, as the start date for the new calendar, while others more Brahmanically inclined chose the religiously significant heliacal setting of the Agastya star (Canopus) on May 24 as a reset point to accommodate the 251-days error, causing the revised New Year Day to fall on September 15.
Thus, the ancient trans-oceanic connection between Kerala and pharaonic Egypt shows up not only as an unacknowledged undercurrent of Vishu, but perhaps it also suggests yet another reason, albeit a mundane one, for resetting the old Malayalam calendar: the change was long overdue.
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